One evening earlier this week, Nicholas decided to pretend to go to sleep in Mommy and Daddy's bed. He climbed up, put his head down, and waited for us to put the blanket over him. Then he asked for a story.
This was an unusual request. Nicholas has gotten used to stories as part of his bedtime routine, but we almost exclusively read books. Frankly, I don't mind, because I'm not a particularly inventive person [cue snarky comments from the uncles]. I'd rather read something than make up a story (can you tell why I'm a historian?). But I decided to try to indulge him.
And so was born Ni-KOO-loos (spelled phonetically), a little boy who goes on adventures with his parents. In the first story, he was going for a walk, and after it got dark saw an owl and a giraffe (part of the plot, of course, involves Ni-KOO-loos's daddy assuming that he couldn't possibly see a giraffe in the dark, but there you go). Then they go home and Ni-KOO-loos gets ready for bed. Oddly enough, he has roughly the same bedtime routine as Nicholas! This means that Nicholas can help tell the story, though I'm not sure he's yet fully made the connection that the whole thing is basically a Bizarro World, and of course we'll have to wait a few years to show him the Seinfeld episode. Not even going to bother with Superman. Anyway, Ni-KOO-loos gets ready for bed, and then lies down with his dolls: Almo, Jihnny, and Silverfield (Nicholas thinks this last one is hilarious but doesn't get the pun).
Apparently he liked the story because he insisted that I tell it again last night. We needed our Nicholas to get ready for bed, so we made the story conditional on his getting ready for bed while I told it, since he'd initially taken off for our bed as he was asking the question.
I got him to agree at the end that we could tell more stories about Ni-KOO-loos next time.
His next adventure? I think it involves a baseball game.
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